Nonlinearity of Creative Endeavors

Have you noticed how creative endeavors such as writing, programming, or designing progress nonlinearly? You don’t get the same amount of creative output for the same amount of time spent, day in day out. Sure, you can set goals—so many words a day or so many lines of code per day, but writers and programmers know that sometimes they’d finish a whole lot in one day and sometimes there may be little to show after several days of work. That’s what I mean by the nonlinearity of creative endeavors.

That’s just the way things are with creative work, but the trouble is that those who manage the creative undertaking expect a steady progress. They want twenty five percent of the pages finished and twenty five percent of a computer program written when a quarter of the allotted time has elapsed. They want the creative output to appear at a steady pace—linearly with time. It’s just simpler to manage that way. So what’s a writer or a programmer to do? At first I thought of trying to explain the concept of nonlinear progress, but I realized that that’s a lost cause. Instead, I started using the concept of buffering. You know... generate more stuff when everything seems to be going well, buffer it for the future, and dole out the creative products—pages of writing or lines of code—in a steady, linear fashion. Buffering your creative output is one way to bridge the world of creative endeavors and the linear expectations of the world that wants to manage creativity.

Comments

[l.m.orchard]

If I've learned one thing about my creative output in the past few months / years, this is it. Not that I've been consistently able to practice buffering, but man is it frustrating to just be flying along for a few days and then hit a wall for as long as a week-- only to suddenly have a dam-break and solve all problems in a caffeine-fueled rush :)

[Joe Wikert]

Naba -- I couldn't agree with you more! When I stop and think about it, I find myself buffering all sorts of things in my work life. It all comes down to the old saying "under-promise and over-deliver." All authors should give this some thought as a way to stay on track. On the publishing side, we tend to get antsy and worry about a new author who falls behind. If they learn to buffer correctly they can reduce the risk of missing a delivery date. I also think milestones tend to cause some authors to freak out; they worry that an important date is slowly creeping up on them and wind up thinking the average number of pages they have to write between now and then is too much. If they stop and think about the peaks and valleys of the process, they might not get so worried.

[Roger]

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